Toby by Todd Babiak Read Free Book Online Page B

other night, coming home from a conference in New York. By the way, what the hell sort of name is Toby?”
    “Jewish.”
    “Shut up.”
    Toby tried to regain his fury. He bit the inside of his cheek, but it didn’t make him furious. It only made his cheek bleed a little.
    “It sounds like an adjective.”
    “A Toby, Mr. Demsky, is a coffee mug in the shape of a man’s head. With a three-cornered fisherman’s hat on it. Now, if you will excuse me.”
    “Your parents named you after a coffee mug.”
    “It was coincidental. It’s short for Tobias.”
    “So I’m on the airplane, and the two men sitting behindme start whining in these battered tones about a meeting they’d just escaped. Some brainstorming session about Internet piracy. They were involved in the music industry somehow; I guessed lawyers.” Mr. Demsky reached up and pulled out a pen that had been hidden behind his ear in his wreck of white hair. “How’d that get there? I musta slept with it!” He removed his glasses and tossed the pen at the wall. A rumble started in his chest, like the old Husqvarna chainsaw Edward had bought from a farmer to transform the fallen trees of the ice storm into firewood. It was something between a wet cough and a laugh; Mr. Demsky appeared to levitate out of his chair. The episode went on long enough for Toby to peek down at his timepiece, at his shoes—scuffed—and to think fondly of Alicia’s neck.
    “Can I fetch you a glass of water, maybe, before I accept a position at your competitor’s station? Where I’m treated with respect.”
    “The in-flight movie comes on and it’s some piece of shit about dogs. Dogs and kids in the same movie is always murder. The stewardess is embarrassed, as we should all be, as a species, so she starts handing out magazines. I take a New Yorker. Guess what the two music lawyers go for.”
    The smooth transition from chainsaw to anecdote had paralyzed Toby. The blood in his mouth was surprisingly salty.
    “I said guess.”
    “ Rolling Stone. ”
    “Wrong!” Mr. Demsky slid the remote controls down the desk and leaned on his forearms. “Sure, that’s the obvious response. Music people read Rolling Stone and smart people read The New Yorker. But no. No, these two choose a magazine called Gentlemen’s Quarterly. You heard of it?”
    “I have a subscription.”
    “Tobias, it’s a whole goddamn magazine about being a gentleman. ”
    “I’ve learned quite a lot from it over the years.”
    “Etiquette.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And men’s clothing and perfume and spa treatments. Book clubs. How to please women orally. It’s fat with advertisements. There were a couple of recipes inside. One was for brioche! It’s a girl magazine, but for men. Men like you, Tobias.”
    “Like me.”
    “You ever been in a fist fight?”
    “No.”
    “Ever built a garage or shot a handgun?”
    “Oh no.”
    “Play any sports?”
    “I go to the gym.”
    “At first I thought the music lawyers were a couple of Kansas City faggots. But when one of them went to the can, I spotted his wedding ring.”
    “Well, it is legal now to—”
    “Can you believe it?”
    “I have a subscription, Mr. Demsky.”
    “You know what these two talked about for the rest of the flight home?”
    “No.”
    “Guess, Tobias.”
    “Rap music.”
    “They talked about the decline of good manners.” With some cussing in a language Toby took to be Yiddish, Mr.Demsky stood up out of his giant leather chair and sauntered to the window. “You been overseas?”
    “No, but—”
    “A man must go overseas, Tobias. This isn’t an actual country we’re living in; the sooner you understand that, the better. It’s a big, big suburb. It’s a place you graduate from.”
    “A suburb.”
    “If we didn’t have oil, we wouldn’t exist.”
    “What does that mean? We wouldn’t exist? ”
    “Wood hewers, water carriers. That’s all we can do. And we’re impolite. Litterers. Spitters. We dress like hobos, most of